Britain should stay and fight for a better Europe

It’s none of America’s business, but it’s hard to see what we’d achieve by
abandoning the European Union

Is Britain in danger of making itself a laughing stock on the international stage by kicking so vigorously against some of the iniquities of the European Union? This was certainly the implication of the Obama administration’s impertinent intervention in Britain’s ever more fractious relationship with Europe.

The UK is not about to roll over and let its tummy be tickled on this issue, and if that’s what the land of the free is saying it ought to do, then it should be politely ignored. Britain is not yet the 51st state, and its European affairs are nobody’s business but its own. America seems to be suffering from the same sort of democratic deficit as the EU’s political elites in thinking that we should compromise our freedoms for the sake of US foreign policy goals.

As one of Europe’s three biggest economies, a huge export market for European goods and, in absolute terms, one of the four largest net contributors to the EU budget, Britain enjoys a negotiating position that is actually much stronger than it appears. They need us more than we need them, and it would certainly be most unfortunate if the union were to gain Croatia as a member only to lose the UK. As Mrs Thatcher demonstrated, it is possible to get your way in Europe, but it requires conviction and firm leadership.

That’s not to say there aren’t dangers for Britain in adopting a tough stance. We could quite easily find ourselves painted into a corner and, because of European pig-headedness, forced to leave. The economic consequences of such an outcome are frankly anyone’s guess. Yet, assuming the EU survives, this would certainly make the UK increasingly less relevant as an international force. There is plainly a risk of marginalisation and even persecution.

And perhaps most worrying of all, it might deny Britain the positive role it currently plays in Europe as a force for free trade and democratic accountability. It’s not always the case, but, historically, things on the Continent have a nasty habit of going wrong when the UK retreats behind its island shores.

Certainly, the more economically liberal northern states regard the prospect of British withdrawal with utter dismay. Germany, Holland, Ireland and Sweden all find common cause with us in resisting some of the sillier dirigiste forces that are proving so harmful to European freedoms and economic progress. There is a sense in which Britain needs to stay in if only for the purpose of saving Europe from itself and its wilder flights of fancy. Nor is this purely altruistic – Britain has a powerful self-interest in a stable, prosperous Europe.

In this sense, the US is right to express concern. America also wants a settled Europe capable of acting as a buffer against the still-not-entirely-obsolete ambitions of the East. Twice in the past century, the US has been forced to intervene to bring stability to this once perennially warring continent. Whatever its failings, the EU has largely succeeded in taking the European problem off the table, freeing up America to focus on new sources of geo-political instability in the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific. Britain provides America with its bridgehead into Europe, and is a powerful ally in supporting US interest within the EU.

Philip Gordon, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, has urged Britain to think twice before leaving the EU Photo: AP

Silenced by the near-fatal eurozone debt crisis, Britain’s pro-European lobby has been keeping its head down this past couple of years, even as the Eurosceptic mood has grown in popular and political support. Yet somehow or other, the euro has survived the immediate financial crisis, and in recent months we’ve seen something of a fight-back, with warnings not just from true believers such as Nick Clegg, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson about the dangers of sleepwalking towards the exit, but from leading business figures too.

At the CBI annual conference in November, the organisation’s president, Sir Roger Carr, insisted that the voice of business needed to be heard loud and clear on the virtues of future engagement in Europe, not as a reluctant participant, but as the linchpin of Britain’s wider trade ambitions. And in a letter this week to the Financial Times, signed by, among others, Sir Richard Branson, a number of business leaders warned David Cameron that his determination to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with Europe risked taking us out altogether.

Like the US, these voices shouldn’t be taken too seriously. All are essentially part of Europe’s power and economic elite, and therefore have a big vested interest in the status quo. Yet in one important respect, they are right. Europe has become a racket in need of root-and-branch reform. Any institution that can routinely ignore the referendum votes of its member states has got to be viewed with the utmost suspicion. That Britain could have important parts of her transport policy determined by a former Estonian communist, to cite but one example of the current state of affairs, is beyond ridiculous.

Even so, reform is generally better achieved from within than by storming out in disgust. It seems to me that Mr Cameron has got his position largely correct. The much tighter integration that survival of the single currency requires automatically puts Britain, with its own monetary policy and sovereign currency, in a very different position from the rest, so it is only right and proper that the UK should formalise a rather looser relationship.

But this is a long way from abandoning ship altogether. Beyond the saving on the price of club membership, which amounts to “just” 0.24 per cent of GDP, it’s not clear what else would be achieved. Stay and fight for a better Europe: that has to be the rational approach.